Abstract
We explored 12-month-olds' flexibility in accepting phonotactically illegal or ill-formed word forms in a modified associative-learning task. Sixty-four English-learning infants were presented with a training phase that either clarified the purpose of a sound-object association task or left the task ambiguous. Infants were then habituated to sets of Czech words with onsets that are illegal in English (e.g., ptak), consonantal sounds (e.g., /l/), or novel functionlike words (e.g., iv). When infants were provided with a training phase that highlighted the purpose of the task, they associated the phonotactically illegal Czech words, but not the consonantal sounds or novel functionlike words, with objects. Thus, English-learning 12-month-old infants' flexibility in associating various sound forms with novel objects is limited to labels that share the structural shape of well-formed nounlike words.
Highlights
We explored 12-month-olds’ flexibility in accepting phonotactically illegal or ill-formed word forms in a modified associative-learning task
Our results demonstrate that English-learning infants will associate word forms that violate the phonotactics of their native language to objects when the referential role of these to-be-learned novel words is clarified
When the referential role of these phonotactically illegal words remains ambiguous, infants fail to make these word– object mappings. These findings suggest that when infants are presented only with the linguistic information from a to-be-learned label in the word-learning task, their language-specific preferences guide their word– object mapping
Summary
We explored 12-month-olds’ flexibility in accepting phonotactically illegal or ill-formed word forms in a modified associative-learning task. When infants were provided with a training phase that highlighted the purpose of the task, they associated the phonotactically illegal Czech words, but not the consonantal sounds or novel functionlike words, with objects. English-learning 12-month-old infants’ flexibility in associating various sound forms with novel objects is limited to labels that share the structural shape of well-formed nounlike words. Ments, we ask whether 12-month-old English-learning infants’ pref- month-olds will map contentlike words (meaningful items, such as erences for specific word forms will be overridden in a sound– object nouns and verbs), but not functionlike words (grammatical items, association task when provided with referential cues that indicate that such as determiners), to objects
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